"For as long as people have looked to the skies, the red star has been their hope"

Given the symbol's history in Hungary, it would be hard to claim that the red star is - as the Strasbourg court has ruled - a symbol with "many layers of meaning".

Stalin and Mao

"We drafted a Kossuth shield with a double cross and red star on top of that," Janos Kadar told a meeting of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party's central committee on 7 May 1957. He was responding to a complaint from Sandor Jakab, first secretary of the party in Nograd county, who was concerned that the planned new state shield "did not reflect the power of the workers," and that he would "prefer to see a machine gun" alongside an "indispensable" red star.

"It's not about being radical on our shield," said Kadar. He added that many citizens had expressed opposition to the "counterrevolutionary Kossuth shield" and supported the adoption of the new symbol, which was in the national colours and bore a red star.

He asked those present to vote in favour of the proposed symbol that was to be adopted at the first seating of parliament following the

1956 revolution. This decision allowed him to go back on a promise he had made six months before that the Kossuth shield would stay and that the red cross would be removed from the list of national symbols.

In the excitement of the 1956 revolution, many protested against the red cross, which was thought to be "alien to the nation." MPs bowed down to the people's wishes - the 3m-wide red star was taken down from parliament's cupola at around half past seven in the evening.

Nobody has written a serious study of the red cross in Hungary, which was banned as a symbol of dictatorship alongside the swastika by Jozsef Antall's government in 1993. This makes it hard to argue with the Strasbourg court's claim that the symbol's history has "many layers of meaning". The historian Ivan Harsanyi links the symbol's first use to the left-wing of the Social Democrats, but the only evidence of this he was able to provide was the fact that Endre Ady's 1907 poem "The Red Star Will Never Fall" was first published in Nepszava, the social democrats' daily paper. He added, however, that the Third International of the communist and workers' parties chose the red star as its symbol in 1919, adopting a symbol that was already in widespread use.